The Dragon Revenant - Katharine Kerr [162]
“Master Kinna! It’s Tondalo. I’m back.”
The figure raised his head and pushed back the hood of its robe: Nevyn. The scriptorium vanished. They stood face-to-face in the white mist.
“Tired of running?” The sculpted face of Nevyn’s thought-form wore no expression at all, not a snarl, not a smile, nothing. “Go where you will, but every road will lead back here to me.”
The Old One felt as if he still had a body and was slowly sinking to his knees. The room spun in a swimmy blur, a whirlpool, a murky vortex of gold-shot white light.
“You have one last chance.” Nevyn’s voice spun round the vortex to reach him. “Forswear the Dark and submit to the Light.”
“Curse you! Curse you and all your wretched kin!”
Nevyn vanished. The Old One knew only movement, felt himself to be one tiny point of consciousness that was swirling, rising, caught now in the whirlpool, choking, spinning, fading, always spinning—
Then nothing at all.
“You want to know what happened to the Old One?” Nevyn said. “Where does a candle flame go when you blow it out?”
When he realized that he understood, Salamander shuddered in his very heart. By then the flames were swarming and swirling over the entire villa and the compound around it, the greasy smoke spreading through the sky and staining the light into a hellish parody of sunset. Yawning and sighing like any old man waking from a nap, Nevyn sat up, stretched his arms over his head, then clambered to his feet.
“Let’s find the others and get on the road. When those slaves reach town, the archon will send men out to investigate. I’m in no mood to be arrested just yet.”
“Quite so, oh exalted master. Ye gods, you gave me a turn in there! I honestly thought you were going to die to save our miserable and unworthy lives.”
“You’re not the only one who can put on a good show for the marketplace. Look—there’s Gwin and the warband riding for us. No doubt they’ve been a bit worried. But—oh by the Goddess herself! Where are Jill and Rhodry?”
Salamander swore and went cold all over again as he counted up the riders and realized that his brother and his pupil were nowhere among them. Without even thinking he began running toward the black and flaming ruins of the villa. Cursing a steady stream under his breath, Nevyn followed.
When Jill and Rhodry rushed out of the house into the garden, they found the wooden ancestor statues already burning, licked with leaping flame like huge logs in some giant’s hearth. Smoke poured around them and billowed down from the blazing shake roof in a swirl of darkness while the heat parched and trembled the living trees and flowers. Through the crackle and roar of burning Jill could hear men screaming, trapped in the upper rooms of the villa. Choking and coughing she dashed for the gates in the outer wall only to realize that she’d lost Rhodry. She spun around to see him turning round the corner of the house and racing down the narrow passage between it and the outer wall on his right.
“Rhoddo! Stop! Come back!”
“He went this way!” Rhodry kept running. “I heard his chain clanking.”
For the briefest of moments she stood crippled with fear. With the roar of a thousand demons a plume of fire burst free from the roof and towered in a spew of golden sparks.
“Rhodry!”
Cursing him in her mind Jill ran after him. Dodging sparks, choking on smoke, stumbling at times and leaping over a clot of burning debris at others she raced down the passage and burst free just barely in time into the clutter of sheds behind the house. Already roofs were smoking and charring as the Wildfolk swept among them in an orgy of ruin. Through the smoke she could just make out Rhodry, hesitating by the back wall.
“Come on!” she screamed at him. “Out the